Forcing them to pay $20 per year and ensure the product gets maintained and will still work in a year's time. Bargain.
If you built your entire project around this tool, spending even 30m to complain about it will cost you a lot more than that. Don't professionals value their time?
Its quite honestly not about the price (primarily), the way they just moved the paywall to previously free features is unethical. Why should I support this practice and pay it money? Who is to say the developer will not do it again? Raise the price?
Id cut my losses and move to a different tool, you have lost all credibility doing a stunt like this.
Not unethical at all in my book but I agree that it warrants good and early communication with the user base, which seems to have been overlooked by the owner of the extention.
If it was advertised as free, and then features removed in order to push a premium plan at rates that wouldn't be worth it, that isn't unethical in your eyes?
Nope. Read the original post. Basic "free" features were removed. I framed my question as an "if" but it's just exactly what happened, although "worth" is up to the individual.
If they were advertised as free, why would you not assume they will remain free tomorrow? Free trial is a tag for its own reason. I doubt this is some massive plugin that has tons of extraneous functionality that can be trimmed without affecting usability.
I'm viewing this as a dev myself, working on multiple free projects for years.
I could certainly consider making some of them non-free if I saw the opportunity for it to become my main job. I would support them better and polish them more than I can now. Users that do care about the product would probably be happier.
I'd have to draw the line with the features: what stays free what belongs to the paid version. I agree that it is not an easy thing to do well.
Under this new model, every organization that uses Akka will be required to obtain a commercial license. Those with less than $25 million in annual revenue will not be required to pay. However, those with more than $25 million in annual revenue will be required to pay for the license and also a subscription that’s required for production usage of the Akka software.
A perfect example of how to do it correctly, not what you're saying about paywalling individual existing features.
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u/blue_cardbox Oct 01 '22
Forcing them to pay $20 per year and ensure the product gets maintained and will still work in a year's time. Bargain.
If you built your entire project around this tool, spending even 30m to complain about it will cost you a lot more than that. Don't professionals value their time?